On my final night on Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, I joined a yoga class in a window-walled lodge with dream catchers dangling from the rafters. The class’s attendees were blissed out from spending several days in late February skiing. As we stretched, a man wearing gray athleisure gave us all high fives before unfurling his own mat. It was unclear what we were being congratulated for—perhaps our luck. Whatever our stories, we’d landed here, in the snow globe that is the Wasatch Mountain Range.

Lying on my back, I could see the area’s surrounding mountains and the lights inside a dense thicket of town house–style condos—all that seemed to stand between the lodge and Paradise. Literally, Eden is a 58-mile drive south of the town of Paradise, Utah, making Powder Mountain some kind of mecca.

Since the 1970s, the mountain’s pilgrims have been skiers, drawn to its unpretentiousness and unbeatable conditions. Today, it’s also a Zion for a different kind of seeker. Construction began this summer on a public mountain town that will straddle a 10,000-acre site between three skiing bowls. In 2013, Powder Mountain was purchased by Summit, a company—or, perhaps more accurately, a collective—founded in 2008 by five 20-something friends who want to “catalyze entrepreneurship” and “create global change.”

With $40 million raised from its “members”—mainly tech entrepreneurs recruited through days-long events on the mountain, on cruise ships, or, this fall, in downtown Los Angeles—Summit plans to build 500 single-family houses, a village for amenities, and a home for the organization’s nonprofit arm, Summit Institute. By 2022, Summit says much of the village will be operational and occupied, with full build-out occurring over the next 20 years.

Despite having some of the trappings of an exclusive retreat for start-ups, Summit Powder Mountain is not a gated community or a resort. Its founders say they are creating a year-round community for innovators, thought leaders, artists, scientists, and others to solve the world’s most pressing challenges, from environmental catastrophe to access to basic medical care.

The leadership is baking equal opportunity into the town’s design.

They plan to do this, in large part, by physical design. Mapped out over years by a coterie of prestigious architects and planners, Summit adheres to a logical grid and strict aesthetic guidelines specifically meant to avoid a dissolution into a ski resort of McMansions and Gucci outposts. If you attract the right people, the founders envision, solutions to global problems will come on a shared chairlift ride up the mountain, or during a fireside chat between strangers.

While Summit doesn’t like to associate itself with the word “utopia,” its turn to architecture to reflect and contain its ideals puts it squarely in line with the hundred or so utopian societies, secular and religious, that were founded in the United States in the 19th century, and also the hippie communes of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of these societies failed because of change—in religion, politics, technology, war. But when they did succeed—as Summit hopes to—it often had a lot to do with how successfully their physical world matched their spiritual and intellectual goals.

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I flew out to Powder Mountain during one of Summit’s weekend retreats, where 150 or so attendees paid $1,500 for skiing, farm-to-table meals, guest speakers, and entertainment. The retreats are aimed mostly at entrepreneurs, though the organization says anyone “kind and open-hearted” and “doing innovative work regardless of your discipline” can attend.

That’s a tricky line to toe when also offering a rarefied experience. At a communal dinner on my first night, guests gathered at one of the mountain’s original ’70s-era lodges. The banquet tables were set with tea lights, and we shared braised beef from a cow that had grazed the mountain over the previous summer. A spoken-word poet asked everyone to shout our names at the same time.

Later, while most people were skiing, I traveled between three lodges on the mountain, one of which is a yurt-like structure called Sky Lodge on the very top. Whiteout conditions prevented me from looking out over the deck and better envisioning Summit’s snaking site plan, so I worked on my laptop instead, sipping something called Saffron Elixir and listening to the deaf-blind advocate Haben Girma discuss her disability-rights work. When lunch was served, Summiters clambered in on their boots. “This is next-level, man,” I overheard one of them say. (Summit has values—and it has perks.)

Summit’s founders say they are creating a year-round community for innovators, thought leaders, artists, scientists, and others to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. (Marshall Birnbaum)

One neighbor, as Summit calls future residents of the town, is Bryan Meehan, the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee. “There’s a lot of amazing progress happening in California in technology,” says Meehan, who lives in Marin, “but sometimes we don’t pay attention to the impacts of progress socially and environmentally. The conversation can be too focused on how beautiful this bottle of wine is, or ‘have you seen my new Tesla?’” At Summit, the discussions might be about poetry or regenerative agriculture. Pass out your business card and you’ll get the cold shoulder from the Summit community.

Christiana Moss, a cofounder of an architecture firm involved in design and planning on the mountain, refers to Summit’s founders as “compassionate capitalists”—businessmen with a heart, who want Powder Mountain to seed new companies, philanthropic endeavors, and creativity. “You have young people with revolutionary ideas hanging out with people with a lot of money who can make their ideas happen,” Moss says of Summit’s design. If it works like its supporters hope it will, Powder Mountain will become a new center for thought leadership, and one that isn’t located on either of the coasts: a new American campus.

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As Chris Jennings writes in Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, the experimental communities that were born in the 19th century “intended to catalyze a global revolution by building a working prototype of the ideal society.” The Shakers built more than 20 communities in the United States and are known for their distinct architectural style, with its identical sets of doors, gates, and stairways—everything in perfect symmetry and broom-swept starkness. Others, like Brook Farm, inspired by transcendentalism and founded in the 1840s in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, attempted to construct a single building to house their entire community and bind it together spiritually.

In the 1960s and ’70s, rather than create communities meant to transform the world, a new wave of DIY counterculturists escaped it. They constructed camps like Drop City, established in 1965 by four art students and filmmakers who bought seven acres of land in southeastern Colorado and erected Buckminster Fuller–esque dome structures made of junkyard scraps. By 1977, Drop City had been abandoned, but not before a period of intense creativity ensued.

One of Summit’s inspirations is Aspen, Colorado, as the Aspen Institute’s founder Walter Paepcke originally conceived it. In the late 1940s, Paepcke began buying up property in the defunct mining town with the intent to make it not just a vacation retreat, but “a Kulturstaat, a civilized state organized around culture and thriving on it,” writes James Sloan Allen in The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. By the 1950s, Paepcke had succeeded in opening a ski resort, the Institute, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the International Design Conference. But Greg Mauro, a venture capitalist who purchased Powder Mountain with the other founders, believes the opulence of Aspen of today would be anathema to Paepcke.

Other utopias can look alluring on paper, but would have been dystopian in practice.

Sensitive to potential criticism that Summit Powder Mountain could become a wealth ghetto, the leadership is baking equal opportunity into the design of the town: subsidizing artists-in-residence, building cabins and hostels, adding low-income housing, offering fellowships to artists and entrepreneurs, and creating programming for the town of Eden’s 600 residents. It would be a fake town otherwise, says Mauro. As a managing partner of Learn Capital, a venture-capital firm focused on educational technology, he hopes to bring schools to the mountain, too, aiming to grow the permanent population one or two percentage points per year.

In part, Summit’s owners are banking on a 125-page book of design guidelines to discourage potential residents who would want to steer the town toward luxury. Private houses designed by architects such as Brian MacKay-Lyons (who, for years, created his own utopian experiment on his family’s farm, calling it the Ghost Architectural Laboratory) and Todd Saunders (whose work, like MacKay-Lyons’s, often feels like a dramatic extension of its surroundings) must adhere to the guidelines, which dictate what can and can’t be done on the mountain, down to a list of acceptable shrubs, houses capped at 4,500 square feet, and a “modern mountain” style.

* * *

No one at Summit mentioned Salt Lake City in any of our discussions, but the Mormon-founded city is only an hour’s drive south of Eden, and it’s an obvious example of urban planning and architecture as physical embodiments of ideals—and one that survives, in an evolved form, today. Just as Summit’s founders knew that Powder Mountain was their future home as soon as Mauro introduced them to it, Brigham Young supposedly declared “this is the place” about Salt Lake City in 1847, kicking off nearly a century of impressive architecture, industry, and growth for Mormons and non-Mormons alike.

Other utopias can look alluring on paper, but would have been dystopian in practice. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, an “anti-city” plan the architect introduced in 1932, laid out a gridded suburbia that isolated families within their own one-acre plots of land, and made the automobile central to survival. With no true center, Broadacre City would have siloed the programs that create a sense of community: schools, public transportation, retail, recreation.

Summit, too, has risks. The project has been criticized by some Eden residents who are wary about what is being built and how it will affect their town. The organization recently clashed with some people over water rights; “Summit Sucks Water” signs still dot some lawns. (Echoing Mauro, Jeff Rosenthal, another of Summit’s cofounders, says that if the town of Eden doesn’t accept the mountain town, he’ll deem the project a failure.)

Summit is building 500 single-family houses and a village. Construction will continue over the next 20 years. (Paul Bundy)

There’s also the issue of diversity—of great importance to Summit. While Summit’s attendance is around 55 percent men and 45 percent women, the organization was founded by young, white men. For some members, that translates into a tangible feeling of a boys’ club. Personally and professionally, Summit has been a boon for Rebecca Clyde, a cofounder of a digital-marketing agency and a chatbot startup: She’s met friends and investors, and has considered buying property on Powder Mountain. But she chuckled when she attended a session about the development plans on Powder Mountain. “There were three men up there on this panel, and they were talking about why they loved that mountain: because the land has a feminine energy and the village and concept is trying to harness it,” she recalls. “Where are all the women who are going to bring all this feminine energy to life?”

The French philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote that utopias “present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.” Summit has money, time, sensitive architects, and a mission of goodwill—perhaps all the raw ingredients needed to actually succeed in creating a paradisiacal mix of leisure, thought leadership, philanthropy, and education.

Still, the intentional communities in the United States have tended to fall short of their initial feverish inspiration, or else survived in isolation from the rest of the world. Summit’s brand of utopianism is not that of the 19th century: Its community isn’t interested in multiplying Powder Mountains across the globe, nor is it cut off from the world in an outcropping of geodesic domes in the desert. As an idea, Summit Powder Mountain is some next-gen hybrid. Time will tell if it can become a real place—and not just another resort town.

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

In February 2011, Swiss citizens voted in a referendum that called for a national gun registry and for firearms owned by members of the military to be stored in public arsenals.

“It is a question of trust between the state and the citizen. The citizen is not just a citizen, he is also a soldier,” Hermann Suter, who at the time was vice president of the Swiss gun-rights group Pro Tell, told the BBC then. “The gun at home is the best way to avoid dictatorships—only dictators take arms away from the citizens.”

Apparently many of his fellow Swiss agreed. The referendum was easily defeated. Gun ownership in the countryhas deep historic roots and it is tied to mandatory military service for Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 34. Traditionally, soldiers were allowed to keep their weapons at home in order to defend against conquering armies. These fears came close to being realized during the Franco-Prussian War on 1871; as well as World War I, when the Swiss border was threatened; and World War II, when the country feared a Nazi invasion.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.